Motorama
January. 13,1993 RA ten year old boy gets tired of life with abusive parents and cashes in his piggy bank and steals a Mustang. He rides off into a surreal America playing "Motorama," a game sponsored by Chimera Gas Company. He has various encounters with different people, and eventually reaches the Chimera Gas Company where he finds they are not playing by the rules of the game.
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Reviews
everything you have heard about this movie is true.
best movie i've ever seen.
As Good As It Gets
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Little Gus is a ten year old delinquent. He runs away from his parents and decides to go on a road-trip. Reaching the petal is somewhat tough for him, so he creates a device to help him. His goal is to win a gimmicky lottery type card game called Motorama. He has to find all eight letters in order to spell M-O-T-O-R-A-M-A. Dark laughter follows as it turns into the road-trip from hell. He runs into some deranged Lynch like characters. Most memorable is the gas station attendant, who puts his picture on a kite in hopes that God will see it. Later Gus gets a tattoo and an eye-patch for his injured eye. He becomes one of the most rebellious bad-ass 10 year olds you may ever witness on screen. This is no kid's flick! Look for cameos by Jack Nance, Flea and Drew Berrymore. Be warned although Drew is on the front cover, she only appears in the film in a dream sequence for a couple seconds. Also the film gets confusing towards the end reaching David Lynch territory, you may want to watch it a couple times. "Motorama" was written by Joseph Minion, most well known for his screenplays for "After Hours" and "Vampire's Kiss" So enjoy this depraved surreal road-trip of fun!
Some movies are off-beat, but enjoyable, but many movies are just mind-numbingly weird. "Motorama" fits not-so-nicely in the latter category. Many seem to like it because of endless guest appearances and a total lack of sense, but those two things can only take a movie so far, and "Motorama" simply doesn't have any other merits to its credit."Motorama" delights itself on plot improbabilities. Its main character, Gus, is a cussing 10-year old on a roadtrip across an imaginary country trying to collect game pieces to win $500 million. When interacting with adult figures, none of them seem to notice or be concerned with the fact that he's 10 years old. At first it's incredibly funny, but it quickly becomes just too unbelievable, especially considering the people he runs into and the fact that he seems so unfazed by a lot of the disturbing (to someone that age) imagery going on around him. Gus has no depth, and, as an anti-hero who has no problem causing misery for others to get his game pieces, it's hard to feel sorry for him when he encounters trouble.That trouble is provided by a slew of guest appearances, each mistreating Gus in more and more strange ways. Besides making the already worn-out plot even more unbelievable and less enjoyable, the characters share Gus' lack of depth and are equally unmemorable. The character's actions can get a little interesting, but the actors themselves don't add anything to them, thus negating the whole point of getting big names (they could've been played by anyone and the character would've been the same). These guest appearances seem to have been signed more for marquee value than anything else."Motorama" should be interesting - it's a unique idea, but there's too little semblance of sense in the script for it to work. Incidents that should have a lasting effect on the anti-hero and the viewer don't, as the movie quickly moves from incident to incident, in the hope that something will eventually make the audience feel sorry or understanding for Gus. That never happens, as by doing so nothing is allowed to connect, it just jerks back and forth as if on a conveyor belt, one incident after another. With a story so nonsensical it ceases to be enjoyable, and a main character who never evolves to care for himself or anyone else on a higher level, "Motorama" has little to offer except a brat sneaking around and trying to get rich. Why should we care about that?
This has got to be one of the most magnificent things I've ever seen on film. I don't know if it's as serious as it seems to try to be, but that hardly matters. This film is extreme, absolutely wild and surreal. The packaging and the marketing only make it more so because you *know* that ever so often some mother has to reprogram her kid to accept our reality after he checks this out from the video store expecting something completely different. Look at the roadmap, for one thing! And where else in America can you see a ten year old kid swear as much as this one does and then get his eye ripped out by pervert the rival of Pulp Fiction's Zed? And that food inspector scene is the best! The amount of well known to vaguely recognized actors in this film is one of the best things about it: Soon, much sooner than you realize, you too will find yourself saying, "Is that Meat Loaf? Is that Drew Barrymore? Is that the holideck doctor from Star Trek: Voyager? Is that Flea? Is that the sawmill owner from Twin Peaks gassing squirrels with car exhaust? And isn't this guy from the new Rob Zombie movie? He looks an awful lot like Shrek." I think my favorite scene is at the very end, with Phil in a full body cast. I mean, please, why aren't more movies like this shown in airplanes? This director hardly has anything else to his name higher than Return To Salem's Lot, but he displays true stumbling man-child genius in this creation! If you're an intellectual looking for something to p**s away your evening on, I highly suggest this film for satisfaction. This movie's plot is all too ridiculous, but imagine it taken out of context: *boy arm wrestling an over aggressive Meat Loaf, who seems hell bent on taking out his anger at not being accepted into Guns N Roses, looks over his shoulder and sees the doctor from Voyager enter the bar* Can you imagine what any half brained channel surfer active through the last six years would think of seeing that? Now imagine if you actually cared about Meat Loaf or Voyager to begin with! Or imagine if you're a Flea fan. Rocky Horror Picture Show fans, this film contains notable music, mind you, but its soundtrack is more plasticine than Mad Max 3. What does that entail for you? This is the retarded, inverted mongoloid cousin-sister-mother-puppy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. How about when Gus' sleeve flies back onto his arm in an act of cable-access special effects quality mastercraft? When I saw this film, it was on the suggestion of my cousin who had watched half of it in a fit of half-aware childhood in the early half of the nineties and who has since been haunted by vague memories of it, I myself had not slept in three days. It made me laugh! Of course, it's also an anxiety movie. The music doesn't encourage the suspense but it eventually gets to the point where it's been fully established that the American Censorship Committee has obviously missed this film entirely and absolutely anything can happen in it and probably will any time Gus turns a corner or the view so much as changes camera angles. I found myself obsessing over the possibility of those cards flying out his window at any second. Watch this movie. Awesome!
This movie is incredible. It is one of the few truly unique films out there, and I can't believe I hadn't seen it until just last night. It doesn't fit into any trite movie formula, but it's also not meaningless fantasy. Motorama truly has a hypnotizing effect on the viewer. You become as obsessed with trying to figure this movie out,as the boy is with winning motorama. I love how this film is pure metaphor and completely disregards reality. It takes place in a completely fictional world. Even the names of the states and the money are fake. And yet there is something so familiar about that world. I won't say anymore about the plot, but I just highly recommend this film to anyone who appreciates an original and strange story.